


This Moment As Is

by Chaifootsteps



Category: The Dark Crystal (1982), The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Alien Biology, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bottom skekMal, M/M, Multiple Orgasms, Two characters in a very odd relationship having odd sex for odd reasons.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:48:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21581419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaifootsteps/pseuds/Chaifootsteps
Summary: In the wake of the encounter that nearly ended them both, SkekMal and UrVa meet in the forest, in the night.For SkekMal.
Relationships: skekMal/urVa (Dark Crystal)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 73





	This Moment As Is

SkekMal sits in perfect, awful silence, and watches his counterpart sleep. Close enough to smell the travelling rations on his breath, and the medicating salves that linger on his short, sandy fur.

Reckless. _Stupid_ to leave the Circle of the Suns with pains that rend and tear and hobble. The Heretic and his Mystic would have urged, then outright pleaded against it, and the old fool would have left anyway, insistent on doing something more than lying still, adamant that a return to water and greenery would do more to heal his spirit than any poultice or berry. How exactly like a Mystic. How exactly like urVa.

So SkekMal waits. Listens to his heart beat faster, now and again, but never enough to signal wakefulness.

An hour.

Two hours.

A miracle that either of their hearts are beating at all. Aughra's offer of treatment, _proper_ treatment, in exchange for Gelfling lives, and working together with the Scientist, a long, tenuous transfusion of Skeksis blood given with the utmost reluctance. But it had done what vial after vial of essence forced down his throat had not, as even he could have told them would prove to be the case. A broken body, a slow path to healing ahead, provided he ever wants to hunt again; the knowledge that the Skeksis in the castle are madder by the day.

But he lives.

Three hours.

A sharp, sudden, shared twinge of pain beneath the ribs, enough to make his counterpart grunt in repose. UrVa knows, surely knows, long before he opens his eyes, and raises his head to the sight of the Hunter silhouetted against the deeper darkness.

“Greetings, skekMal.”

“ _Archer_.”

A statement of fact more than a greeting. UrVa pays this no mind.

“You've traveled further than I. For what purpose?”

“You crippled yourself when you turned that bow against me. Had to see for myself how you bore the wounds.”

“Ahh. Well, then, you have your answer.”

“Surely it does not escape you that I walked away that day, and you fell like a stone. Even now, you shamble on in agony, a pathetic wounded thing. What does that say, I wonder, about the stronger between us?”

“An excellent question. One I often contemplate myself.” UrVa rises, slowly on all four arms, bearing the pain in silence this time, and does not reach for his bow. SkekMal, likewise, does not reach for any of the weapons that adorn his own person. “Tea? I find myself in need of it.”

SkekMal snorts.

Most Mystics skekMal can name have a gentle aversion to starting fires if they can help it, particularly in densely wooded areas. UrVa is perfectly capable of brewing strong, soothing tea over a real pot of boiling water but this time, for whatever reason, chooses the handful of slate-gray stones he carries about in one of his many satchels. He rubs them in his hands for what seems a needlessly long time until they begin to glow a soft yellow, then an arterial red, and by the time he's set his canister over them, they're hot enough to warm the contents to some satisfaction. SkekMal wonders if recent events have humbled him or if he's just not willing to indulge in any display of non-Mysticism in front of skekMal, not after what's transpired between them.

“You're aware, then, that the Skeksis have not been honest with you,” he says, only after the tea is brewed; only after he's taken several long, thoughtful, grateful sips. SkekMal, who has slithered over the damp grass and crouched on the other side of the hot stones, growls low.

“I'm not here to talk about the other Skeksis.”

“Fair enough.”

“I thought better of you. The Heretic spends his days breathing sand, _itching_ to extinguish himself. How readily you chose oblivion for yourself, all for the sake of a few Gelfling.” UrVa swirls his tea, silent and contemplative as the stars. Too silent; too much like the other Mystics that waste away in hiding. “Speak to me! I _know_ you're afraid.”

“There is no creature alive that does not in some way, in some form, fear the greatest of unknowns. Not the Dousan. Not the Mystics.” He blinks, and skekMal despises it, the way he looks at him, as though he truly knows him so well that it becomes an inconvenience to say it aloud, these things they already know. “Not you or I.”

SkekMal grapples with it. Burns with hatred for the pain, for his own weakness; both that which is manifest in his flesh and for coming here this way, for the fact that he was ever young and foolish enough to think he could share a hunt, a fire, and a roll of herb with his Mystic and not have those secrets shared come back to haunt him all these trine later.

“But it does not escape me, Hunter, that you speak of oblivion. You who once spoke with such hope for a return to the wilderness we love so well. I agreed with you then. I agree with you now.”

SkekMal's claw strays to the hilt of his favorite skinning knife, deliberate enough to allow urVa to see it. “If I could send you there this very moment, I would.”

“Of course.”

“You've become soft, Archer. Soft and hopeless.”

“And you, easily swayed. So it seems time has made fools of us both.”

SkekMal strikes the canister of tea from his hand, and lays him out like an old hide, crouching with a foot on his chest – both their wounds shrieking with pain – and takes him by the throat. Trembling with eagerness for an excuse to lash out, but urVa doesn't resist. Most Mystics wouldn't, but the point is urVa would have, once. Not in trine long since past, not when they were young and foolish, but mere unum ago.

“ _I_ take your arrows and I still stand. _You_ wither and fade on that slab and _I'm_ the one who's forced to follow you down into the dark. It defies sense. Defies nature, justice!” He tightens his grip until he feels the prick of talons against his own skin, both of them knowing it to be an impotent gesture, but he's earned it, this pounding against the bars of his own cage. " _I’ve done nothing to earn this tether, least of all to you._ ”

UrVa gazes back at him. Through the darkness skekMal finally reads something other than the dull, defeated apathy of Mystics, and locks his eyes upon it, as though loathe to let it slip away.

“It is anything but fair,” says the Archer quietly. “If you had come all this way purely to take your frustrations out on me for the way things are, and have become, I would not begrudge you for it. You would speak for both of us. But...I don't believe that's why you have come here. You've come because death has tasted us, considered us, and walked on.”

When skekMal opens his mouth to snarl some retort, urVa takes his beak gently in hand. SkekMal, who could pierce his wrist and live with the agony, goes perfectly, perfectly still. “It's alright, skekMal. I understand. I feel it too.”

SkekMal exhales a sharp breath, ragged as his own beak. 

“Disrobe.”

An order, yes but not so much as a permission granted. SkekMal, despising the way his pulse quickens, all the more the feeling that he's crossed deserts and been given invitation to bathe in cool water and sleep upon soft furs, claws off his armor with such haste as to catch the bandaged punctures, leaving deeper tears. His pride burns, as he knew it would regardless of how this encounter turned out, but though urVa's robes fall away slowly, patiently, there's an urgency there, easily missed to anyone else on the face of Thra, but never to skekMal. He leaves the mask, and urVa as always makes no comment on this.

He kicks away his last trapping just as the Archer is spreading out a blanket. A buffer between themselves and Thra, which came so close to claiming them.

“Lay beneath me.”

SkekMal spreads himself out, snorting and growling his impatience, but voicing no further complaint. He's already half hard, and urVa covers him carefully, mindful of both their wounds, stretching out his long, heavy body and making minor, seemingly inconsequential adjustments with the placement of his feet and hands. SkekMal has seen him move faster before, with hungrier movements, seen him fuck like a Skeksis, but that's not what either of them need tonight. He knows it won't be his primary phallus he'll be unsheathing, larger and thicker than that of any Skeksis, and meant for spreading, for claiming. Instead, what skekMal expects to feel – and what he does – is the soft, flickering touch of urVa's prehensile grasper. Gentling over his inner thighs, every movement a caress.

The Mystics, skekMal knows, can spend hours like this; belly to belly, arms entwined, coupling silently and still save for the movements of their graspers. It can be the most frustrating thing conceivable, but it quakes him to his knees now, just how much he needs it.

UrVa licks him with it, slow laps over his vent. Getting him wet, getting him ready. The intimacy of being face to face, boxed in by the Archer's limbs, terrifying and mortifying and at the same time, a cold poultice on a weeping burn. When he enters, it's nearly frictionless, skekMal's body welcoming the gentle, smooth, snaking appendage. UrVa voices his approval with a low, quiet hum, and skekMal responds with a fangless hiss.

And there they remain. The gradual, exploratory squirming of urVa's grasper within him playing his nerves like a slow harp on a long, sunny day. The Archer's hips rocking every once in a great while, but never with any urgency. SkekMal closes his eyes, and leans into his counterpart's mane, smelling the forest, and drifts on the sensation as one might on a lazy river.

“We're still here,” urVa rumbles beside his ear. “You and I.”

“Hmm...”

“I have the sound of your breath. Your heart. You have mine.”

“...We survived,” skekMal affirms. “For another day.”

He breathes, slow and present and even...and if he inhales too deeply, painful. A reminder of how perilously close they came, but also, he supposes, a reminder that they scrambled back from the ledge, and a reassurance of their continued existence.

Breath. Heart.

Heat.

Warm fur, warm skin. The warmth of one another's sexes.

“The world is crumbling,” he confesses. “How can we be expected to know where to go from here?”

“We'll figure it out. Together, or not. For now, just hold tight to me. Simply be. We can agree on this, can't we?”

“...Yes. Yes, we can.”

The three sisters above them, slivers appearing and disappearing behind clouds. SkekMal watches them, and reflects on how very close they seem, and how far. There's the smell of a Night Keeper in the trees above them, hunting peepseeks. A strand of urVa's mane tickles his neck.

He remembers the first time they ever did this, when they were young. He'd mocked it, how quintessentially Mystic it had been, to rut by lying around on the ground and doing nothing. UrVa had responded by pinning his arms down and teasing the spot he liked with that clever curling little tip until he growled and hissed and finally begged. Even now, it moves in a way that makes his talons twitch, his legs grasp tighter around urVa's big, soft hips.

“This is...pleasant,” he grants.

UrVa noses at his neck.

“Safe,” the Archer agrees. “I confess, I prefer us this way.”

SkekMal rasps a chuckle, somewhere between derisive and sincere. “I'm not making you another flask of tea.”

“Of course.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

His erections rest against his stomach, untouched and leaking. He contemplates working a hand between them, wondering if urVa will take umbrage and whether or not he should care, and gives up the thought in the end, comfortable and content to coast along for the ride. He smooths back urVa's mane in order to mouth his long neck with careful fangs, finds that the skull gets in the way, and sets it aside. Once again, neither of them comment on this.

UrVa strokes him a little faster, harder, drawing circles on his top wall. It brings them to their first climax of the night, easy and amicable as warm honey. SkekMal reaching it with a hitch of breath, urVa with a sigh, soft and low. His grasper twitches, but never stills.

“Foolish old creature...” he mumbles, not without a hint of affetion. UrVa shifts his heavy tail so that it lays across skekMal's, and the Hunter gets the hint, tangling them together, loathe to let a single morsel of closeness go unmissed.

And so it goes. Shifting now and then into more comfortable positions; a leg that needs to be stretched, or a shoulder shaken out, for it's an unfortunate fact that Skeksis fare worse off at remaining in static positions for extended periods of time. For a time, a long one, they say little of substance.

A second climax, sitting up so that urVa's grasper can massage him in long, dragging strokes. Moaning aloud into the Mystic's shoulder.

A third, stretched out on their sides, face to face.

“I think that skekGra and urGoh may be somewhat misled,” urVa speaks up at last. SkekMal wonders how long he's been mulling it over.

“Just somewhat?”

“We're not the same, you and I.”

“Not at all.”

“It's a difficult thing to remember, connected as we are. But it's true. There is a great power and importance in it.” Thick, calloused, careful fingers trace the creases on skekMal's face. “I've been grateful to understand you, skekMal. Not because of where we've come from. But through all you have chosen to share with me.”

Another time, any other time at all, skekMal would have scoffed at his sentimentality – if not necessarily for the untruth of it, for saying it like that. But not when they're joined like this. Not when he's comfortable, away from the world, sheltered in the refuge that is urVa's gentle, polite presence in his body, and in his understanding.

“...I will not allow you to be the death of me.”

“And I cannot allow you to be the death of Thra,” urVa replies evenly. Brushes a bit of something, wet grass maybe, from skekMal's cheek. “But...fortunately...you don't wish that either. Do you?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, then.”

SkekMal sags beneath the temptation to believe anything approaching what he wants to hear; any inkling of assurance that things may turn out alright yet. That the dark clouds on the horizon serve as harbingers of anything save their mutual destruction.

“You'll ask me to abandon the hunt, I expect. To turn against the Skeksis.”

“Far from it.”

“Then what _do_ you want of me?”

“I want you to lay back. Trust me with your neck. Let me breathe of you.”

SkekMal does, and urVa draws a line of painless nips administered with broad, flat teeth. Warming his skin with his sighs.

There's never been any clear end point when he allows urVa to take him like a Mystic; they'll go as long as they please, to their mutual satiation as they decide it stands, and on more than one occasion, have fallen asleep in the middle of it. Apparently, some of the Mystics are rather indifferent to the idea of orgasm as a whole, and are perfectly content to pleasure one another for hours for no reason save the sake of it.

But urVa is not one of these Mystics, not with him, and when he starts to twist in on himself in a way that no Skeksis – and indeed, no creature on the face of Thra bearing a vertebrate could – skekMal begins to get the suspicion that he's being fucked a little.

“Is that...that your way of saying you want to have at me with the thick one?”

“Would you like me to?” answers urVa, annoyingly steady.

“I'm asking what _you_ want.”

UrVa just rolls over, taking skekMal with him, scarcely slipping from him, and skekMal immediately takes the hint, rocking with renewed vigor, urVa holding his hips down tight upon his own increasingly restless grasper. It's not just licking him from the inside out, but licking him the way a Landstrider eats fruit. SkekMal's knees are already trembling.

“There you are,” UrVa assures. SkekMal leans forward, bracing himself on his belly, scraping up quadruple handfuls of his short fur, tail thrashing, voice angling upwards. “Come now. It's alright. It's just us.”

So skekMal cries out.

His puncture wounds wail in protest and he knows anyone in their right mind would scold him for opening them up again, but it feels right, feels like _them_ . He feels _alive._ There is no suture that can give to him half so much as he has here, gasping the night air while grinding down on urVa's grasper. 

He comes with a snarl that becomes a final scream; UrVa, with an audible groan, which for urVa is every bit as good as a scream. Embarassingly wet, fur slicked down, but skekMal's not the type to mind, not in his right mind and not where he's followed urVa so gladly.

He teeters forward, into the Archer's arms. That they receive him, and that he remains there, says all that needs to be said.

_I'm glad we're here._

***

The morning comes softly, and they sleep late into it. There will be things to discuss, or not. They will matter immensely, but not just yet.

And skekMal will make him another flask of tea.


End file.
